Nina and Herald stood rigidly outside the General's office. They were waiting for the one man whose oversight had placed them in this predicament. Olford arrived in a hurry, clutching thick stacks of parchment. The three of them exchanged a tense, silent look before pushing the heavy doors open.
The thick door muffled the sounds of the fort, leaving a vacuum of silence inside. Sama stood over a tactical map of the Sanni Forest, but his eyes weren't tracking troop movements; they were seeing the clinical, heartless precision of his son's final spear-thrust.
When Olford entered with the instructors, the temperature in the room seemed to drop. Nina and Herald stood at a rigid salute, their pulses racing so loudly they were certain the General could hear them. Olford, however, moved with the weary determination of a man who had already accepted his fate, placing the stacks of Zaemon's economic projections on the table like a shield.
Sama didn't look at the map; his gaze was fixed entirely on his trusted steward.
"I don't think I should explain the situation to you," Sama said. The anger in his voice was a cold, sharpened edge.
"My Lord, it was my mistake," Olford replied, his voice carrying the weight of absolute sincerity. "I intended to report to you once the Young Master had further refined his fighting style."
Nina and Herald both raised their eyebrows, stunned by Olford's blunt admission. To their ears, it sounded like a death warrant.
"Oh? And when might that have been?" Sama asked, gritting his teeth so hard the sound was audible in the quiet room.
"When the Young Master gave me permission to do so," Olford replied, without a hint of fear. "He didn't want to waste your time, My Lord."
The air grew thin. Sama looked from the steward to the instructors, whose breathing had become rapid and shallow, their fear a tangible scent in the small office. A flicker of confusion surfaced in his eyes. He had expected a conspiracy, but Olford was offering him a tragedy.
"What do you mean, old man?" the General asked, the anger in his voice momentarily eclipsed by a haunting doubt.
Olford didn't flinch. He saw the "General" in front of him, but he spoke to the "Father" hidden beneath the armor.
"You have to understand, My Lord," Olford said, stepping closer. "The Young Master has spent nearly every moment of his life without the company of peers. We are all consumed by our duties; our only interactions with him are centered on study or the rigours of training. Even Lady Zeni, despite her love, is hindered by her health and the weight of her own responsibilities. She cannot always bridge the gap to a child's heart. His dedication—this lethal style he has forged—is not just talent. It is the result of profound loneliness. It is the only way he knows how to seek the attention of the giants who surround him."
Both instructors were drenched in sweat as they listened to the conversation, their eyes darting between the steward and the General. Sama's hand tightened on the armrest, the wood groaning under the pressure.
Nina and Herald wanted nothing more than to leave as quickly as possible. Silence hung in the room for several heavy seconds.
"Nina. Herald," Sama said, his voice dropping into a low, toneless rumble. "Leave us. Take your reports and wait for the training schedule at dawn. Not a word of this conversation leaves this room."
The two instructors didn't wait for a second command. They saluted with frantic precision and practically fled the office, the heavy doors thudding shut behind them.
Sama's other hand remained on the map, his fingers digging into the parchment until the edges began to tear. The realization that his six-year-old son was mentally and physically outperforming any child of the same age was a heavy burden—one made heavier by the memory of his own childhood under an uncompromising father. The weight of Olford's words—the "loneliness" of a child seeking a giant's gaze—was a different kind of pressure. It was a strike that bypassed his armour entirely.
"You say his discipline is a plea for my attention. You say he dedicates himself to his studies and breaks spears just so I will look at him." Sama paused, his throat tightening. "Tell me the truth, old friend. Does my son hate me?"
He turned around, his eyes searching Olford's face for a truth he was terrified to hear. But before the steward could reply, Sama spoke again, his voice sounding older, stripped of the General's command.
"Olford," Sama began, "you have known me for a long time, even before our exile. Even though I only truly came to know you later through my father, you saw me take this fort when it was nothing but a graveyard of stone and turn it into a machine of war. You have seen me break men and beasts alike. So, please... tell me the truth."
He turned his back to the steward and stared out the narrow window toward the watchtower where Zaemon often sat in solitude."You know, for most of my life, I hated my father—his way of life, his teachings. Even though his training and skills formed the foundation upon which everything I have and love now stands, the irony remains: even knowing the truth, and knowing that he always loved me, I still cannot rid my heart of the hate I feel for him."
Olford didn't answer immediately. He looked at the stacks of paper—the blueprints for control and the tax models designed to turn a lawless land into a productive state—and then back at the father who had sacrificed everything to keep his family alive in the wild, yet had unintentionally built a golem.
"He does not hate you, My Lord," Olford said softly, his voice carrying the weight of his recent inspections. "But he is terrified of being a burden. To a mind like his, an asset that does not produce is an asset that is eventually discarded. He doesn't hate you—he is trying to prove his utility so that you will never have a reason to let him go."
Sama closed his eyes. He had just realized that he had accidentally made the same mistake as his father. He had wanted a weapon to protect the family, but he had unintentionally taught his son that he only had a place in that family if he was a weapon.
****
As Zaemon reached the medical wing, the air was thick with the scent of iron and medicinal herbs. He knew his mother had also watched his fight from the sidelines.
Zeni watched her son and remembered that while the soldiers cheered for a "Star Lord," her own reaction had been a jagged fracture of maternal terror and physical agony. Standing on the sidelines, her mana-burned channels had throbbed with a residual heat—a constant reminder of the price she had already paid to mask his Spirit Seed. To her, every precise, clinical strike Zaemon landed wasn't a triumph of skill, but a terrifying confirmation that her son was an anomaly—a "High-Value Asset" that the Kingdom would eventually try to seize and weaponize.
When the spear finally snapped, she had stopped breathing. She didn't see a warrior; she saw a six-year-old child standing in a blood-soaked pit, his eyes devoid of the natural fear that should have been there. The sight left her "strangled" by expectation and dread.
Later, as she clutched him, her gaze carried the weight of a silent apology. She knew that by allowing this trial, she had let the Star Fort claim another piece of his childhood to ensure the family's survival in the Forest of Sanni. Her jaw remained clenched against the "curse of surviving" her injuries, her relief at his safety overshadowed by the haunting realization that to protect a miracle like Zaemon, she might eventually have to lose him to the very world she was trying to keep at bay.
The transition from the arena's dust to his mother's solar felt like crossing a rift between dimensions. The heavy scent of iron and boar musk still clung to his skin—a stark intrusion into her world of pressed linens and dried lavender.
Zeni didn't wait for him to reach the medical room. She was across the floor in a heartbeat, her silk skirts hissing against the stone. Her hands— calloused and smelling of rosewater—cupped his face with a desperation that felt more invasive than the boar's tusks. "You're pale, Zae," she whispered, her eyes frantically scanning for a wound. "Your hands... they're like ice."
He looked at her, and for a moment, his 21st-century mind struggled to process the intensity of her grief. To her, he was a six-year-old who had just stared into the maw of death. As Zaemon felt his mother's trembling hands, he made a conscious, agonizing decision. He allowed the natural reactions of his body to come forth; he pulled his firewall offline.
Without the firewall to partition the stress, the Earth-born man stopped overriding the "hardware" of the six-year-old boy. The result was a flood of delayed shock that hit his nervous system all at once. His small hands, which had been unnervingly still in the arena, began to shake with a violent, uncontrollable tremor. The memory of his past-life father's lonely death combined with the sight of Zeni's tear-streaked face. In his previous life, he had no mother to run to; here, she was a warm, physical reality.
Zeni felt his heart hammering—not with the steady rhythm of a soldier, but with the frantic, erratic pulse of a terrified child. To her, this was the most beautiful thing she had felt all day. She had feared she was raising a spiritless construct, but the frantic thrum against her chest told a different story. He was terrified. He was vulnerable. It proved he wasn't a "construct" or a "weapon"; he was her son. She buried her face in his hair, her own mana-burn flare-ups forgotten in the face of his vulnerability.
"I'm here, Zae. I'm here," she whispered, her voice a ragged prayer.
Even as she comforted him, her strategic mind was already cataloguing the event. She knew the world would be watching. She knew the spies of Royal and Provisional Nobles would hear of the Heir's "breakdown." Part of her felt a dark, protective satisfaction: if the world thought he was a traumatized child, they might stop looking for the "miracle."
She sensed he was losing consciousness, so she quickly took him to bed.
Sama Hatar stood in the doorway, his silhouette blocking out the light from the torches and curious eyes of the others . He had come to meet his machine-like son, after meeting with Olford but he stopped mid-stride. His eyes, usually as cold as the iron of his blade, softened as they landed on the sight of his wife shielding their sobbing son. The "Boar" in him wanted to tell Zaemon to stand up, to find his sidearm, to be the "Wedge." But the man who hated his own father—the man who had just been told his son was "profoundly lonely"—couldn't find the words.
Sama didn't enter. He simply stood there, his hand resting on the doorframe, watching Zeni sleeping with Zaemon's head on her lap, the two people he had traded forty years of his life to protect. For the first time, the General realized that the most important place in the Star Fort wasn't the one where maps were drawn or strategies formed, but the one where a mother held her son in the dark.
Zaemon fell into a deep sleep from the overload of stress and fatigue in his mother's embrace.
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